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REVIEW CLASSIC THE CHERRY ORCHARD Dundee Rep, until Sat 19 Sep ●●●●●
Since its first production in 1904, The Cherry Orchard has posed thorny questions for theatre-makers, not least the issue of how to balance the disarming blend of black comedy and tragedy in Chekhov’s final play. Vladimir Bouchler’s production makes a decent stab at marrying these two strands but proves only intermittently engaging.
The problem is exemplified by the first act, in which the sparseness of the staging, married to some restrained performances, distances the audience from the action, with only Emily Winter as Varya fully communicating the family’s despair at losing their estate. Minor characters appear and disappear without leaving any real sense of their importance to the complex class hierarchy depicted or even their connection to the family.
There are some stylish moments, not least when the stage is flooded in cherry blossom, but it’s only in the second half that the symbiotic connection of Irene MacDougall’s Madame Ranevskaya to the eponymous orchard becomes clear, while Bouchler varies the pace sufficiently to draw us in to the action. Winter impresses throughout as the sadly passed-over daughter; MacDougall and Kevin Lennon’s eternal student Trofimov spark off each other in a feisty argument about love, while John Kazek convincingly balances the impatient desire for acceptance and awkward self-doubt of lowly born, self- made man, Lopakhin. (Allan Radcliffe)
Theatre
PREVIEW ADAPTATION THE BEGGAR’S OPERA Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, Sat 12 Sep–Sat 3 Oct
The publicity images for Vanishing Point and the Royal Lyceum’s new adaptation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera don’t look like your average promotional material for a classic work of 18th century satire. In fact, from a first glance, the backlit, (gas)masked vigilante taking centre stage, you’d think you were looking at the poster for a new superhero movie, adapted from a dark amoral graphic by the likes of Alan Moore, say. They’ve even made a trailer for it.
‘I’d say the whole thing has that sort of graphic novel texture about it, yeah,’ says director Matthew Lenton. ‘If I’m honest, one of the things that appealed to me was that The Beggar’s Opera has been around for a long time; John Gay’s been dead a long time. It gave us the freedom to fuck around with the original a bit.’
Gay’s original text pitted the charming, evasive highwayman MacHeath against the thieves and petty criminals of the English underworld. Lenton has found that the characters slotted easily into the sort of near- future urban nightmare that a modern, cine-literate
audience would recognise from Alan Moore’s Watchmen or Christopher Nolan’s updating of the Batman franchise.
‘The superhero form is something that’s become very popular in mainstream cinema. Most of our superheroes now, they have two sides to them: the one side that sets out to help people, and the other, which is kind of dark and fucked up and flawed. It struck me that that’s what MacHeath was like. So there’s a classic superhero element to our version: on the one side that dark, evasive persona, on the other side, this deeply flawed, deeply human thing going on. I wanted to play around with that idea.’
Lenton assures me that people who’ve loved the work
will still find their favourite characters and the original spirit of the work intact, though.
‘All the relationships are still there. We’ve kept the story, the structure; we’ve just . . . rethought it. What I most like about the original is its primal, feral quality. It’s about the very essence of human behaviour. I like that, and I like that it’s not too intellectual a piece of work. It’s more about visceral texture and that animal side of being human.’ (Kirstin Innes)
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REVIEW ADAPTATION THE SILVER DARLINGS King’s Theatre, Glasgow, until Sat 12 Sep; Dundee Rep, Tue 22–Sat 26 Sep; Seen at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, Tue 1 Sep ●●●●●
There’s something cinematic about Kenny Ireland’s staging of the Neil M Gunn novel, adapted here by Peter Arnott. It’s in the sepia photographs of crofts, brochs and cliffs that form a backdrop to Hayden Griffin’s open set of layered coastal rock. It’s in the swell of Matthew Scott’s imposing score. And it’s in the choral presence of the ten-strong company, evoking the spirit of a close-knit community eking out a livelihood from the sea having been forced from the land in the Highland clearances. Perhaps it’s also in the amplified voices which distract from the intimacy of Gunn’s tale and make it harder to settle into the incident-heavy narrative of the first half. As is often the case with adaptations, there is a lot of ground to cover – a farming community learning to become fishermen, a crew press-ganged at sea, a single mother forging a new life for herself – and by the interval it feels that, despite the catalogue of events, the play has yet to start. Only in the second half do Arnott and Ireland allow space for the characters to breathe and to make a proper emotional connection with Gunn’s story of economic survival.
Meg Fraser’s stoic Catrine finally gets to learn the fate of her husband (a scene at sea
delayed from an earlier place in the novel) and to engage in greater depth with the community around her. From the frenetic activity of the first half emerges a touching, romantic tale that captures much of the flavour of a hard period of social transition. (Mark Fisher)
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84 THE LIST 10–24 Sep 2009